Talia and Zaric were trapped on wagon one, away from the bulk of the fighting. They weren’t quite useless, but close to it. Zaric, at least, was necessary to clear the way forward, which had gone from smooth going to increasingly cluttered with debris. Hitting a stray rock at the wrong angle, with the speeds the wagons were going at…
The whole situation was a disaster waiting to happen.
When the call had gone up about the horde behind them, Talia had originally gone to join the skirmish along with the rest of the forward complement. Fireballs were well and good, but the Infiniwand and her own kinetic affinity would be a great help in the defence. Flexibility and variety often trumped pure firepower, and Osra was apparently drained from refilling the rapidly depleting wands.
Now I get why Zaric focused her exercises on Capacity.
Unfortunately, no sooner had Talia leapt to the roof of wagon three when a clicker call shot out from behind her.
‘Enemy forward; half speed’
She rushed back, arriving right as Zaric took care of the first wave of aberrants, skewering them on earthen spikes before sweeping them aside like so much trash. The mage-commandrum spat out his clicker, shaking his head.
“Dammit, I need you on the lance, I can’t defend and clear the way at the same time,” he growled.
Talia didn’t even bother clicking an acknowledgement, powering up the artefact and raking the incoming assailants with a stream of molten stone. The third wave received a similar treatment, after which the assault ended, allowing the wagon train to accelerate once more.
The seemingly random attack, though easily dealt with, was worrisome. It implied intelligence that the individual abominations hadn’t displayed. Something had identified her and Zaric as a threat and acted to neutralize them, or at least, keep them out of the main fight. Now that she looked, the clutter that had been piling up on the path ahead seemed a little too uniform, the oily black cuts through rock and crystal just a little too straight to be haphazard.
This isn’t some random attack. We’re being targeted. Something wants us dead.
Thankfully, the mages weren’t the end all be all of the caravan’s defence, useful as they likely would have been in the rear. Apparently, running battles were one of those things that delvers had much experience with. Defenders with long-ranged weaponry perched on the roof of wagons seven and eight, peppering the slavering horde with arrows, bolts and balls of fire. If any of the abominations got too close, skirmishers leapt off to create space before sprinting back to safety.
Talia watched the fight with her mindsense, wincing as a dwarf failed his jump back onto the wagon and tripped. She felt the flutter of terror shoot through him before the screams ever reached her ears. Recoiling, the psion withdrew her senses before jagged, oily limbs cracked his armour like a geode, exposing his innards to sharp silver teeth. The dwarf’s choked shrieks echoed over the din of flame and metallic screeches. The expedition pressed forward, leaving him to be torn apart by the swarm.
Zaric snarled, pulling her presence away.
She watched as a group of aberrations sluiced through the ceiling above them, dripping to the ground, all jagged edges and silvery slick. They didn’t run so much as lope toward the caravan, leaving congealing puddles of oil in their wake.
Talia swung the barrel of the ash lance around, waiting for them to group up tighter before she fired. They never did, and she resigned herself to picking off as many as she could until the trigger for the stone dust clicked, and nothing happened.
Fuck fuck fuck.
The abominations slipped over the carbonized corpses of their slain brethren, rushing up to meet the oncoming wagons. The drivers had heeded Zaric’s earlier call to slow, but that just meant the expedition was being pincered. Something had to give.
Here goes nothing.
Talia groped at the pouch of caltrops—cutting herself as she did—and came out with a handful clutched in a bleeding palm. She took a deep breath, recognized that what she was doing went against everything she’d been taught, and activated the simplistic trinkets anyway.
The spiky bits of iron drank up her mana easily and immediately began vibrating.
Oh, gods dammit why did I think of this?
Her hands shook, but she tossed the deadly implements anyway, as hard as she could, giving them an invisible push with an improvised force construct. Shrapnel pinged against the wood of wagon one, the sound like a coin purse being ripped to shreds by a rock tumbler.
The results were disappointing. The aberrations had been avoiding clustering up in the first place, and their unholy constitution inured them to the shock value of the explosion. Some still collapsed, those who had been too close when the deadly iron finally shattered, but too many survived for Talia's liking. The caltrops still slowed the swarm, however, tearing through blackened flesh and scoring metal bones.
Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.
But it wasn’t enough.
A wave of spikes took up the slack, shearing through the now-bleeding frontrunners and sweeping them aside. And still, the monstrosities advanced with the sound of gnashing metal teeth and greasy flesh against rock.
Zaric snarled again, from the bottom of his chest this time.
“This isn’t working. Be right back,” he said.
What?
Talia almost choked on her clicker as the mage-commandrum dropped off the side of the roof, only for the stone beneath them to rise up and catch him. Wagon one quickly outpaced him, followed by wagon two. Talia’s heart leapt into her chest as she noticed the blockage ahead of them, large pieces of quartz jutting out dangerously from the road, aberrations already crawling over them to join the incoming wave and intercept the command wagon.
Distantly, as she refilled the canister of the ash lance with already prepared dust, Talia felt Zaric’s mind twist into a pattern of imagery too complex for her to grasp. The ground beneath them shook and crackled. Many of the crew froze, faced with the terror that came from a life of risking cave-ins, rockfalls and quakes. They all knew that when the Under tossed and turned, anyone with a shred of concern for their lives took cover.
What actually happened next was beyond what Talia thought possible.
With a liquid ripple, the path through the gallery became a true road. The ground heaved like a shaken rug. Titanic brownshoots were torn from their moorings in the stone, and quartz crystals melted away as if they’d never existed. The magma flow hissed angrily as it was ripped from its bed and redirected.
The wagon swayed under Talia, as a wave of stone rose up to engulf the swarm coming for it. The horde was caught in the rock, but unlike the wagons, they didn’t rise with the tide. Those that didn’t sink entirely found themselves trapped, limbs encased in suddenly hard stone.
Talia couldn’t quite tell, but from the angry screeching, she thought that the aberrations on the expedition’s heels might have found themselves similarly caught in rapidly hardening rock.
Ho—ly—shit.
Before, if you’d discounted the eerie, bleeding holes that had riddled the space, the gallery had been picturesque. Now it was a bleak expanse of bare stone dotted with grotesque living statues. A wave of rock had flattened everything in sight, leaving nothing but a much-reduced river of magma and the petrified remains of fungi and squirming, half-buried monsters.
Talia turned to gape at the sheer power Zaric had exhibited—absently noting that the pace had slowed from the shock— and caught a glimpse of him right as he collapsed, using the last of his strength to grab onto wagon five as it passed by him. She breathed a sigh of relief as a pair of delvers pulled him up and ushered him into the cabin.
The only one to not miss a beat was Darkclaw, and a slew of clicker calls were already sounding out from his position at the back of the column. The line got tighter, and the supply and specialist wagons were swapped out with wagons five and six. The injured were taken to Lazarus and his apprentices.
For a moment, it seemed as if Zaric had earned them a respite. Like they could breathe a sigh of relief.
They pushed onward in tight formation, with an agile rearguard and a few heavily armoured beastkin to support Talia’s ash lance in the front. A pair of dwarven skirmishers jogged along each side of the column, sporting hammers and crossbows. The rest were either resting, injured, or dispersed throughout the wagon train.
There were no cheers, no celebration. Despite their best efforts, they’d already lost two fighters, torn to a frothy pulp by the now petrified swarm. The expedition had just receive a poignant reminder that empty tunnels didn’t mean that enemies weren’t lurking in dark corners.
Talia was sure she’d be kicking herself if she hadn't been sleeping when it happened.
Instead, she scanned their surroundings warily like the rest of the crew, with both her eyes and her mindsense.
Nothing but angry statues. For now.
The eardrum-shattering screeching from the abominations trapped in the stone cut off in eerie synchronicity. Almost as if they’d all given up simultaneously. Echoes of the ungodly sound bounced against the walls rustily for a full five minutes before dying off.
Talia shivered as her mindsense spotted the thoughts and lives of the abominations wink out all at once. On her right, she spotted the trapped monstrosities still, their forms collapsing in on themselves into a puddle of pitch that shimmered menacingly.
The silence that followed was an odd sort of relief. It was the same relief as numbness brought on by late-stage gangrene. Putrid and deceptive. A herald of worse things to come.
Talia flinched and reached for her sword as a hand clapped her on the shoulder. Torval jolted back with hands raised. His cloak hid his features, but the set of his shoulders screamed of resolute acceptance.
‘Status; question,’ he clicked.
‘Operational, mana half-capacity; no threats’
The delvemaster’s hood twitched in a tense nod.
‘Rest; remain alert’
‘Acknowledged; mage-commandrum status; question,’ she clicked back.
‘Out of combat; stable’
Talia allowed her shoulders to sag at the news. With a spell of that size, he was bound to be manaburned, but if Torval deemed him stable, that meant Lazarus was satisfied that he would live.
The delvemaster’s follow-up clicker call faded into meaninglessness as his gaze caught on something to her left. Talia frowned and turned to look as well, right as Torval changed his tune, blasting out a call for maximum speed.
What she saw froze the blood in her veins.
All alongside them, the puddled remains of collapsed aberrations were bubbling and rippling, twisting on themselves until a stream of almost pure silver threaded with the tiniest amount of black seeped from it.
Then it began to move on its own, running across the cave and propelling itself into the magma flow that ran to their left. More and more of the bright, shimmering sludge coalesced into streams that ran into rivers until the floor around them seemed completely coated in it.
A dreadful thought crept into Talia’s mind, and she directed her psionic net at the magma river. Deep within it, threads of light swirled around each other, agglomerating around something that her sense couldn’t detect. Whatever it was didn’t matter though, as the light itself was something she’d come to recognize as life, or at least, living thoughts.
Is this what it’s like to watch something be born?
The caravan outpaced the nascent mind before she could witness its completion, but as it faded from her mindsense, it had already doubled the size of the aberrations they’d faced before.
Whatever was coming to life in that infernal oven was massive. And if her prior interactions with the aberrations was to be relied upon, when it woke, it would be ravenous.
Silently, hunched over the ash lance, Talia prayed that they were far away when it happened, but internally she scoffed.
When has praying ever done anything for me?